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Monday, August 8, 2011

Please disregard my old Yahoo Movies reviews

We've all Googled ourselves. Admit it. I do it all the time. Rarely am I ever proud of reading the stuff I wrote millions of years ago on the Internet. In fact, I've been publishing "reviews" on the Internet ever since 2004 -- when I was 13 years old.

President Obama has warned our nation's children that much of what they post on the Internet is going to be permanent. Listen to your President, kids. Seriously. In the future, we'll all probably have special archive machines allowing us to find things other people posted eons ago. So if you're going to pursue a career in politics, be especially careful.

Now, for all us wannabe filmmakers/film critics, the stakes aren't so high. Nobody much cares what we've said in the past about movies -- except, of course, our own rivals.

Because of that, I wince when I think of what my own "rivals" are thinking when they've Googled my own name (which they probably don't, but you never know) and have found some seriously old reviews I wrote for Yahoo Movies, from 2003-2006. That is not a moment in my amateur career as a film critic I am proud of. The reviews were terrible, I didn't know what the hell I was saying, and I mindlessly tried to make up my own memorable catch-phrases. Worse, I can't go back and delete those reviews. Even worse is Yahoo's despicable crime of changing the dates on those reviews, to make it look like I wrote some of them in 2008.

I'll stop rambling though, and provide some of the links to these awful old reviews of mine. As a bonus, I'll include some of the hilarious things I wrote in the reviews. If the dates on the reviews are correct, I'll leave them unchanged. If not, I'll let you know when I really wrote them.

I'm sure my "rivals" will probably go to town with this stuff. Erm... be my guest.

"The battle of Hoth begins, and the soldiers fight gigantic, four-legged steel machines called AT-ATs. This incredibly visualized battle is given life by Joe Johnston’s visual effects and Dennis Muren’s effects photography. The good guys win the battle, and when it’s over, Luke and the droid R2-D2 (Kenny Baker) set off for Degobah."

[What's particularly embarrassing about the review above is my 14-year old self claiming that the rebels win the battle of Hoth, even though -- if you watch the movie -- they clearly do not.]

"E.T. is today the third highest-grossing film of all time. I wonder why so many people wanted to see it? Maybe they loved Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Raiders of the Lost Ark so much that they wanted to see more from the director who was at the time just beggining. People don't seem to think that today though, because not everybody wants to see his new films and they're not afraid to critisize them. Why would anyone ever do that? Every one of Spielberg's films are perfect."

-Published in Summer 2005, though Yahoo incorrectly claims February 2007

"Return of the Jedi is the greatest Star Wars movie, in my opinion. It is one of my all-time favorite movies, and it’s one of the very best times you’ll ever have watching science fiction in your life. Not a movie that a moviegoer should be without. Great finale, it is. See it, you must. That’s what Yoda would say."

"Variety reviews did not love this movie. They quoted, "Over produced, overly manipulative Spielberg drama is saved by outstanding performaces". WHAT A TERRIBLE THING TO SAY! This film is not over produced OR overly manipulative."

-Published in May 2005, though Yahoo claims May 2008
"Christian Slater’s performance as Adso is remarkable; he was 15 when he performed it. I know, you’re probably wondering how, at that age, he was able to do that sex scene. The truth is, he didn’t know that that was what he would be doing (only Valentina Vargas was instructed about what would happen in it), and so Christian was not really acting in that scene. Strange, huh?"

-Published in Summer 2005, though Yahoo incorrectly claims August 2006

For a while, I thought that Cruise' best performance was in "Jerry MaGuire", but today, on the Fourth of July, I saw Oliver Stone's "Born on the Fourth of July", and my opinion has been turned around."JFK (1991)

-Published in May 2005

"It’s easy to disbelieve the Warren Commission report, but “JFK” also dares to claim that Lyndon Johnson may have also been part of the conspiracy. Not very many people would take that lightly. I do believe that Johnson was a part of the conspiracy, and there even is a possibility that J. Edgar Hoover was also involved, which the movie does not suggest."